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Saturday, October 29, 2011

This week, the Statue of Liberty turns 125! My fourth graders are reading Lily and Miss Liberty by Deborah Kogan Ray. Its a short historical fiction story which explains how children throughout the country raised pennies to help pay for Liberty's pedestal.

We also read A Picnic in October by my favorite author, Eve Bunting. In true Bunting fashion, she leads the reader to think the birthday party the children are preparing for is for their grandmother, an Italian immigrant. At the end of the story we learn that Grandma and family celebrate Lady Liberty's birthday in front of the statue every year. It's become a family tradition, a way of thanking America for welcoming Grandma when she was a young Italian immigrant.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

My original post from 2010: My two favorite Van Allburg books are The Stranger and The Sweetest Fig. The Stranger is a great book to use when teaching inferring. You can see from my poster that I start with: I think the stranger is.... and Here are the clues (details) that helped me: I put asticky overthe answer. As we read the book I had the children make their thinking visible on post it notes and then stick them to the page.We developed the list on the anchor chart together. Many children are able to understand that something unusual or magical is happening but they don't have the background knowledge to come up with the name Jack Frost. This year as I was reading The Stranger to my class I started thinking how much our questions lead us to understanding who the stranger really is. I produced this new anchor chart with the 4th graders. I combined parts of the text with the post it notes where the children made their thinking visible. Here are some pictures:

Saturday, October 15, 2011

The 4th graders have been reading Lou Gehrig The Luckiest Man by Alder this week. Its one of my favorite stories in the 4th gradeTrophies anthology. I like to practice the visualizing strategy with this baseball poem after reading the story. It is called Before the Game by Paul Janeczko.The children pick out three different colored highlighters. We then make a key: what can you see, hear, smell or taste while reading the poem. I typed the poem up on my Smartboard and made a key as well. We also discussed the theme, tone or mood of the poem. Its so evident in that line: Joy, thick as perfume

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Life is like Coffee Movie: Do you know people that just seem to be happier in general? Do you say to yourself, "I want to be more like them"? Often, the happiest people in the world don’t have the best of everything...they just make the best of everything!

Thursday, October 6, 2011

My fifth graders have just finished reading Shiloh. I love the story because it gives us so many things to discuss. Here are some pictures from some of the lessons we did while reading the story:

Character traits: What kind of a boy is Marty? We kept adding to this poster as we read the book. The green sticky is the trait and the orange ones are the text based evidence.

We did some more work on Marty's character traits.

Marty had to make a tough decision when he found Shiloh in the woods. We wrote about all the different options he had. Did he make the right choice? What were the pros and cons of each option? What would you have done?

The story was very suspenseful. Here is the plot profile we created together. You can clearly see the rising and falling action. Chapter 9 was by far the most exciting.Later on in the school year we will read the other two Shiloh books in the trilogy. Christine